Saturday Night Live cold open: Kate McKinnon, Dr. Anthony Fauci return

After a stretch off the air Saturday Night Live returned this weekend for a brand-new episode, and honestly, we had no clear expectation of what the cold open could be. While it was fair to guess it’d be political, was there any one direction they’d go with it? One idea was that they could do a hodgepodge of various headlines set within a fictional talk-show setting; after all, we’ve seen them do that a number of times over the years.

So what did they opt to go with this time around? We should’ve seen this coming, given that this was Kate McKinnon’s first show this season. They were going to give her a ton of screen time, and they did that by bringing her back as Dr. Anthony Fauci talking about the omicron variant. He also brought back some staffers from the CDC (in his words, “nerds”) to act out various scenarios.

Were there some funny moments in the cold open? Sure, but it’s hard to get much comedy out of Fauci or the virus these days. This is what happens when you’ve done so many sketches in this vein over the years. Heck, the show has basically done this “act out various scenarios” bit before. As funny as Aidy Bryant is as Ted Cruz, we’re not sure that there’s a whole lot of meat on this metaphorical bone anymore.

Personally, if the goal was to highlight the return of McKinnon, we wish that they had gone with one of her other more popular sketches or characters. It didn’t even have to be political!

For those who didn’t know, McKinnon was gone for the past several weeks because of her commitments to a Joe Exotic project.

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What do you think about this week’s Saturday Night Live cold open?

Did it provide what you wanted and then some? Be sure to share right now in the attached comments! Once you do just that, be sure to also stick around — there are more updates ahead and we don’t want you missing them. (Photo: NBC.)